THE REACH OF WAR: INSURGENTS; 7 U.S. Marines and 3 Iraqis Are Killed in a Car Bomb Attack Outside Falluja

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: September 7, 2004

A car bomb tore through a convoy of American and Iraqi troops near Falluja Monday morning, killing seven marines and three Iraqis in the single deadliest attack on American troops in four months, American military officials said. It was not immediately clear whether it was a suicide attack.

The bombing took place shortly after 9 a.m. in Al Saqlawiya, just outside Falluja, a city 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been run by insurgents since April, when a Marine assault was called off.

An American soldier was killed and another wounded late on Monday night when a roadside bomb hit their convoy near Baghdad, the United States military said in a statement on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported.

The seven Marine fatalities and the death of the soldier pushed the total of American military deaths to 989, according to figures compiled by the Defense Department.

Elsewhere, a week of silence over the fate of two French hostages was broken Monday when Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, reported that an Islamic militant group holding the men had demanded a ransom of $5 million; it also demanded that France declare a truce with Osama bin Laden and that France and French companies quit doing business in Iraq.

Reuters reported that the group, the Islamic Army of Iraq, had also issued a 48-hour deadline for its demands to be met.

The report dashed hopes, expressed by French officials and a more moderate Islamic religious group in Iraq on several occasions last week, that the two journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, would soon be released. Early last week, reports surfaced that the two men had been handed over to a group that favored releasing them.

The Falluja attack was the deadliest since late April, when a car bomb killed eight American troops near Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, but it was hardly an isolated incident. Mortar fire and roadside bombs torment American soldiers in areas around Falluja and the surrounding province of Anbar, where five soldiers died in an attack on Aug. 21.

That bombing also served as a reminder of the problem that the American authorities are facing in the Sunni heartland, which forms the core of the insurgency. Insurgents have wrested control not just of Falluja but also of the nearby cities of Samarra and Ramadi, where residents say Americans forces are no longer present.

There are signs, however, that American commanders are discussing ways to try to take back some control, though perhaps not with a full-scale assault in which many civilians could be killed or wounded.

In a broadcast on loudspeakers set up in two eastern neighborhoods in Falluja on Sunday, residents reported that American forces had warned them to leave the city, because an attack was imminent. On Monday, American checkpoints blocked the main eastern and western roads to the city, although by 5 p.m., the eastern road, closest to the explosion, had been reopened.

Some residents reported that Americans had later attacked Falluja, but a spokesman for the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lt. Col. Thomas Johnson, said there had been no shelling or air strikes in retaliation for the bombing.

Later on Monday, militants drove through the streets of Falluja in a pickup truck carrying an American drone aircraft that they claimed to have shot down, Agence France-Presse reported.

Distrust of the American occupation runs deep in Falluja, even among ordinary Iraqis. Some of them said Monday that the attack would lead to retaliation by American forces.

''America has proved itself as the people's enemy,'' a cleric from Falluja, identified as Sheik Khalid, told the Arab satellite network Al Arabiya.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government backed down from its claim on Sunday that it had captured Izzat Ibrahim, the highest ranking member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle believed still to be at large. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that medical tests had shown that the man captured in a raid in a city north of Baghdad was not Mr. Ibrahim, but a relative of his.

One bright spot on Sunday was the release -- according to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry -- of four Jordanian truck drivers, whose capture was announced in a videotape aired Sunday on Al Jazeera. A Turkish truck driver seized Saturday was also freed, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said, one day after companies that employ him stated publicly that they had agreed to stop operating in Iraq.

Photo: United States troops collected the bodies of their comrades yesterday after the car bomb attack on an American convoy in the Iraqi town of Al Saqlawiya, in the heartland of the Sunni Muslim insurgency. (Photo by Mohammed Khodor/Reuters)